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You probably don’t wake up every morning (or any morning for that
matter) and think about how you need more 19-year-olds in your
life or in order to effectively grow your business. But, maybe
you should.

I have used college interns effectively to build two businesses
and they have made a significant difference in the growth of each
company.

When we started Sageworks, for example, we developed an
artificial intelligence program to take financial numbers,
analyze them and convert the analysis into language, which
required writing approximately 10,000 pages of text (an eventful
year and a half for me). Once written, I hired a plethora of
college interns to edit the text. It was a cost-effective
solution that was readily executed.

I’ve outlined five key advantages to hiring college students that
you might consider if you’re looking to build your
business.

1. They come with a lot of energy. I have
found interns to be full of life and eager to learn. It may be
that they’re younger and want to prove themselves and explore new
things, but it’s also the case that the internship is not a
full-time job for them so they don’t get into a rut. They can
come in refreshed and energetic, do their work and then leave. I
have found that they add tremendously to the culture of any
company because of these attributes. Today, we still have a
robust internship program that works very well for us.

2. They are inexpensive. They don’t require
benefits and most college interns are happy to make anywhere from
$8 to $18 an hour, depending on where they live in the country.
Since there are not a lot of overhead costs associated with
hiring college students, the overall burdens and risks of using
them are very low. Another fringe asset is that you can change
schedules easily to accommodate your budget, which is likely to
be tight if you’re a startup.

3. They come with fresh ideas. It is really true
that young people have good ideas, in part because they come to
problems from a position of naiveté, which is actually an asset.
A few years ago, we were developing a probability-of-default
model and the company decided to give the entire data-gathering
component of the project to a team of college students,
supervised by a full-time recent college grad. Sure, they can and
did go off the mark a little bit, but with a minimal amount of
management and oversight, their work over the course of a summer
helped us develop a commercial-strength product remarkably
quickly. The company put experienced quant and math people on the
building of the model and allowed the kids to focus on the less
technical work – but work that still allowed them to learn. In
fact, they found some creative ways to get the data we required,
ways that I’m not sure we would have ever thought of on our own.

4. Good interns turn out to be some of the best full-time
employees. Again, this point may be obvious but it is
important. Internships are not just a way of attracting full-time
candidates; they’re a way of finding and hiring new full-time
employees who are very familiar with your corporate culture. Our
former interns tend to stay with our company longer because they
were able to learn about the company before accepting full-time.
In this way, an internship is a try-out period for both buyer and
seller.

5. They will accomplish the “unreasonable.” In
our experience, the college kids (and even some high school kids)
are not anchored to "normal" ranges so they can often bend what
we think of as possible. Our experiences with this are too
numerous to mention. Younger people don't yet have the limits
that they eventually benchmark themselves to because they simply
don't know what they are not capable of. On this note, it’s
important to give interns meaningful work or even "big idea"
projects. Many companies make the mistake of giving interns only
rote activities, where the kids are doing boring, administrative,
task-based work. This is done for obvious reasons, notably, that
interns often don’t come with experience. Lack of experience is a
good thing in many cases since less experienced people will be
less anchored to what they think they should and shouldn’t be
able to do. In addition to the intern’s direct, material impact
on the company, giving kids projects that are slightly out of
their reach excites them and gives them a real sense of meaning
for being at the internship, which also feeds their energy.

How to manage college interns the right way is another topic
altogether. As is always the case in life, people’s assets can
also be their liabilities. College students come with a lot of
energy but they do need some light management and guidance to
make sure their energy is pointed generally in the right
direction. It can be easy for them to fall into doing things that
on paper may make sense but in reality don’t move the company
toward getting something done. Because of their academic
backgrounds, they tend to equate all work with meaningful work,
which is definitely not always true. We’ve tried to give interns
very clear objectives, suggestions for achieving those objectives
and then meet once in a while to refine their activities to
achieve those objectives.